PHPantom

A fast, lightweight PHP language server written in Rust. Ready in seconds, uses a fraction of the RAM other language servers need, and stays responsive throughout. No indexing phase, no waiting.

Note

PHPantom is in active development. The core editing features are solid and used daily on production codebases. Extract Function and broader diagnostics are still on the roadmap.

Features

PHPantom focuses on deep type intelligence. Here's how it compares:

	PHPantom	Intelephense	PHP Tools	Phpactor	PHPStorm
Completion	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Auto-import	✅	💰	✅	✅	✅
@mixin completion	✅	💰	✅	✅	🚧
Generics / @template	✅	🚧	✅	🚧	✅
@phpstan annotations	✅	❌	🚧	🚧	🚧
Conditional return types	✅	❌	✅	🚧	❌
Laravel Eloquent	✅	❌	🚧	❌	🧩
Array shape inference	✅	❌	✅	🚧	🚧
Object shape completion	✅	❌	✅	❌	🚧
Closure param inference	✅	🚧	🚧	🚧	❌
Generator body types	✅	🚧	✅	🚧	🚧
Go-to-definition	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Go-to-implementation	✅	✅	❌	✅	✅
Hover	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Signature help	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Find references	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Diagnostics	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Rename / refactoring	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Time to ready	< 1 s	1 min 25 s	3 min 17 s	15 min 39 s	19 min 38 s
RAM usage	21 MB	520 MB	3.9 GB	498 MB	2.0 GB
Disk cache	0	45 MB	0	4.1 GB	551 MB

_{Performance measured on a production codebase: 21K PHP files, 1.5M lines of code (vendor + application). 🚧 = partial support. 🧩 = requires plugin.}

Want to verify? Open example.php in your editor and trigger completion at the marked locations. It exercises every feature in the table, including edge cases where tools diverge.

Context-Aware Intelligence

• Smart PHPDoc completion. @throws detects uncaught exceptions in the method body, @param pre-fills from the signature, and tags are filtered to context and never suggested twice.
• Array shape inference. Literal arrays offer key completion with no annotation. Nested shapes, spreads, and array functions like array_map preserve element types.
• Closure parameter inference. $users->map(fn($u) => $u->name) infers $u as User from the collection's generic context.
• Generator body types. yield and $x = yield resolve to the correct TValue and TSend from the generator's return annotation.
• Conditional return types. PHPStan-style conditional @return types resolve to the concrete branch at each call site.
• Type aliases and shapes. @phpstan-type, @phpstan-import-type, and object{...} shapes all resolve through to completions.
• Laravel Eloquent. Relationships, scopes, accessors, casts, and Builder chains resolve end-to-end. No Larastan, no ide-helper, no database access required.
• Everything else you'd expect. Generics, type narrowing, named arguments, destructuring, first-class callables, anonymous classes, @deprecated detection, and namespace segment drilling.

Project Awareness

PHPantom understands Composer projects out of the box, but works without setup on non-Composer projects too:

• Autoloader-accurate results. Completions and go-to-definition only surface classes that Composer's autoloader can actually load, avoiding false positives from internal, inaccessible, or duplicate vendor classes. You see exactly what your application can use.
• PSR-4 autoloading. Resolves classes across files on demand.
• Classmap and file autoloading. autoload_classmap.php and autoload_files.php.
• Embedded PHP stubs from phpstorm-stubs bundled in the binary, no runtime downloads needed.
• require_once discovery. Functions from required files are available for completion.
• Go-to-implementation. Jump from an interface or abstract class to all concrete implementations. Scans open files, classmap, PSR-4 directories, and embedded stubs.

Documentation

• Installation. Editor-specific setup for Zed, Neovim, PHPStorm, and others.
• Building from Source. Build, test, and debug instructions.
• Architecture. Symbol resolution, stub loading, and inheritance merging.
• Contributing
• Changelog
• Benchmarks. Completion latency tracked on every commit.
• Roadmap. Planned features and domain-specific plans.

Acknowledgements

PHPantom stands on the shoulders of:

• Mago: the PHP parser that powers all of PHPantom's AST analysis.
• PHPStan and Psalm: whose combined work on static analysis for PHP transformed the language's type ecosystem. Generics, array shapes, conditional return types, assertion annotations: these tools pushed each other forward and pushed the community toward rigorous PHPDoc annotations that make a language server like this possible. PHPantom's author cut his teeth on PHPStan, which is why @phpstan-* annotations are a first-class citizen here.
• JetBrains phpstorm-stubs: type information for the entire PHP standard library, embedded directly into the binary.
• Phpactor: the PHP language server whose comprehensive test suite and benchmark fixtures informed PHPantom's own test coverage. Many of PHPantom's type inference fixtures were adapted from Phpactor's reflection tests.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.